Literary is a Python tool to make Jupyter (IPython) notebooks behave like pure-Python packages. This allows pure-Python packages to be generated from notebooks, and notebooks to be imported at runtime. Literary now bootstraps itself; it is developed with Literary 🤯.
This package is an exploration of the literate programming idea pioneered by
Donald
Knuth and implemented in the
nbdev package. Although nbdev looks to be a very
mature and comprehensive tool, it resembles a significant departure from conventional package development. Literary is an
exploration of what a smaller nbdev might look like.
- Low mental overhead
Realistically, most Python programmers that wish to write packages need to have some familiarity with the Python package development model, including the conventional structure of a package. For this reason, I feel that it is important to designliterarysuch that these skills translate directly to designing libraries with notebooks - Minimal downstream impact
Users ofliterarypackages should not realise that they are consuming notebook-generated code at runtime. This means that a pure-Python package needs to be generated from the notebooks, and it must use the conventional import model. For this reason,literaryshould only exist as a development dependency of the package.